com2kid

Largely bad pathways that aren't being caught in time.

Inefficient commands, for example I launched a bunch of agents for a task and for every command they'd first try it inside a sandbox, wait for the command to fail (sometimes that meant a timeout!) then retry outside the sandbox.

Now do that hundreds of times.

Or just crap like type checking the entire repo again and again.

If you have really tight rein on your agents you can prevent these sorts of issues, but you won't see these issues unless you are carefully monitoring what they are doing to the level of watching cli output scroll by.

Of course at some point the agent.md file needed to keep the stupid away gets so long that adherence drops.

You also end up with just stupid shit. I gave Sol too much free reign and it decided to update my DB schema to save stack traces to a DB.

Code which it then wrote a bunch of tests for. And then used a browser use agent to manually test.

Historically "need money to do big thing" is why companies sold shares.

This isn't new, rather it is a return to normal.

Human in the loop is 1/5th the token usage vs fully autonomous agents.

Agents swarming will 5x your usage, or worse.

The communication overhead of summarizing and status reporting between workers will eat up tokens faster than doing the work will.

Large monolith code bases with multiple layers of abstraction (Typescript to JSON schema, prisma, etc) will eat up more context than the actual work, by far. IMHO this same rule applies for human engineers as well, one of the reasons why I generally oppose too many layers of abstractions/middleware.

On large complex highly abstracted code bases, up to 90% of token usage will be input tokens.

Generally cached, generally cheaper, but not free.

The more you can constrain a problem (talking to black boxes with well defined contracts) the less the agent has to work.

So, you know, good software engineering principles in general.

> Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee

They have infinite money to burn so they aren't going to optimize.

I've seen that trivial changes to workflows can token usage by 30%. Repeat this a few times and my token usage has plummeted over the last few months.

Only outputting test failures instead of having agents read test run output in real time. Not having build logs get fed into context. Projects like UCL (unified context layer) so agents don't rediscover the same facts about a code base again and again.

Giving tools agent output modes so they only print out the minimal info needed for an agent to get work done.

When I hear a company has an absurd AI spend I assume they aren't even trying to reign it in.

What makes a good game has changed over time. Pacman is, honestly, boring as shit now.

Mappy, weirdly enough, holds up well. Bubble Bobble, still good. Mortal Kombat 1, meh.

Some of my favorite classic games, almost unplayable now. Tastes have changed dramatically.

Movies are the same. Very few movies hold up after multiple decades. Some do. But even some great ones don't.

A couple of the UX people who worked on Win8 told me that some of the UX study results were faked to give the desired results that justified the new Win8 design changes.

Def the sort of stories you hear at at a bar after work.

> Christ, at least let the kid think about it on his own and ask questions later! Don't know about your kid, but I don't know ANY person, at any age, that would not feel like they're enduring an insufferable school class with behaviour like this.

Depends on the age of the kid. Started doing this when my son was 3, it helped him learn lots of words for different emotions and it helped him learn to use words to describe other's emotions.

Now that he is older I do this less, it depends on what we are watching though.

Active listening to stories, and actively engaging with media, is a learned skill. It isn't automatic.

I read to him together, a lot, and he'll stop and ask me questions about what is happening in the book. When I'm reading to him and other kids at the same time, other kids will notice him asking questions and then realize they can also ask questions, and pretty soon I am answering more and more questions about what is going on.

> I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.

I turned on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for the first time for my son a few days ago. After a few minutes I asked how the show felt. "Relaxing".

We sat down and watched the Music episode together for 20 or so minutes.

Parents can choose what their kids watch and listen to. Ignore the feed.

If you don't give kids a tablet and instead give them a stack of toys, the kids will grumble and eventually start playing with the toys.

Hell give a bunch of bored kids enough rocks and they'll find a way to build a small village out of said rocks using mud as a connecting material.

> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.

HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.

The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.

> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.

Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.

Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.

TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.

Video/computer games are always played together.

Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.

I was thinking have people from Boston just spell water as waddah and up here in the Pacific North West we can just not bother typing the last few letters on most words.

Controversial hot take:

Simplify the orthography to make it phonic, and then people spell words however they are pronounced in their local dialect.

By hand. I've been gardening for years now and I only have a loose idea what a rototiller is.

But in any given year I maybe plant a dozen new plants tops. 6 tomato plants and half a dozen other random things.

Wait a few decades until your infrastructure needs replacing.

Old water pipes have been the financial downfall of many suburbs.

Odds are you don't have a lot of heavy fright coming through, so your roads don't need constant replacing. You likely don't have bridges that carry heavy freight, those are a maintenance nightmare.

But once all the buried pipes need replacing, suddenly all the roads need tearing up, and that is expensive.

It was reintroduced, in the form of jsx.

Sure there is some embedded JS in there as well but ignore that and JSX is thr XHTML comeback story.

Yeah I've been to Europe plenty. I didn't say not walking is universal, but huge swaths of the US continue to be built out, to this day, with 0 walkability.

Even countries like China have built lots of new car first infrastructure.

Just came back from Hamburg. Everything was tap to pay. Never used cash once.

Maybe in smaller cities, but I haven't hit a major city on my travels for some time now that wasn't digital payment first.

I live in a very outdoors city in a very walkable neighborhood.

I also travel a lot and have visited many places where walking around is just not possible.

You do realize that a number of those are true right?

Cash is dead in many places. Stores all around me have "cash not accepted" signs.

For many Americans walking is dead. Sad but true. Cities got designed or redesigned to be car first.

Amazon put numerous types of stores out of business. There are entire categories of products that can now only be bought online.

ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D

Everytime my system updated my flat pack and Nvidia drivers get out of sync. Claude easily fixes it.

A recent update crashed in the middle and left me running an incorrect kernel for my GPU drivers, if I had of rebooted I'd have been hosed. Thankfully Claude caught it before that happened (steam games refused to run) and fixed me up.

In related news - not a fan of flat pack.

> AI democratized the knowledge needed to build bioweapons. Like how with a 3d printer anyone can build a gun with no expertise.

Building simple guns out of pipes never was hard. Jury is still out if it is more or less work than getting a 3d printer working.

It is weird, a year and a half ago I wrote a blog post (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...) basically describing a lot of what Muse does, except all hosted locally. I included a section about using hardware around the house to enhance AI agents.

When the initial Muse launch happened, my first reaction was "wow this sounds familiar."

Now the HW side of things is announced.

To be fair, this is all obvious stuff that should be done. The key is who can pull it off. It has been pointed out many types that technically Muse is nothing new, some combination of Gemini products can already do it. The counterpoint being that packaging and branding make a product.

I am kind of sad that desktop computer use ended up being the way to go instead of hooking into mobile phones. Mobile phones allow for a lot more potential integrations with day to day life, plenty of services now days are (sadly) only available through a mobile app.

Googles subscription offerings are so confusing, I didn't even know gemini spark was a thing. The Gemini brand means so much now.

Meta was genius in coming up with a new name and offering Muse for free to start. They can upsell you once you see the value. Meanwhile I have 3 existing Google subscriptions to different services and from what I can tell, paying for one of the all in one subscriptions that includes Gemini would cost me a lot more.

I did this two decades ago with slashdot comments.

My random blog was highly ranked for a fair number of technical topics.

5.6 Sol has happily reverse engineered and decompiled binaries for me.

Heck it has proactively asked me if I wanted it to tear apart APKs that remote control some HW I have.

I can easily use close to 100 million input tokens a day. A few million output tokens but at the end of the day maybe a thousand or so lines of code get written.

Yeah embedded means a lot of things.

People working on cortex m series chips still static alloc though. :D

Them and game programmers. Also the HFT people from my understanding.

The latter two are due to latency concerns.

Still though, it is something that I think more engineers should try out once or twice. Thinking about how buffers actually need to be is a useful exercise.

Nah we did something similar on Microsoft Band. I wrote about how - https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/cooperative-multitas...

The tldr is you had to preallocate a struct with anything you wanted captured ahead of time.